It’s the Small Things: Tom Warren at the Abaton Project Room

Tom Warren (2025) “Visual Journal Grid”; 36 individual photographs, 48x72 inches, Abaton project Room. NYC.
 

By JOHN DRURY June 20, 2025

The act of collection, has informed the work of many artists. It is in fevered accumulation – dare I say, a fetishization – that reverence for places and things are in minutia and numbers, allowed voice in commonality through the camera lens of Tom Warren. In simply truthful framing, the perhaps otherwise believed mundane, Warren’s subject, is allowed interest in a subtle variety – that no different the fields of flesh a Helmut Newton, the shadowed topographical an Edward Weston, or the emphasis of tonality and composition of Alfred Stieglitz. His, likewise, is a planar respect architecture as light negotiates metaphorical “brick and mortar”, to bend and gradate in value, as falling on adornment and supposed mark of insignificance. Tom’s is reportage. It is fact, as found; that easily overlooked embellishment making the city negotiable, the innocuous informational the interruption armature and facade.

Photographic image, as compositionally presented, in Tom Warren’s “Visual Journal Grid”, at the Abaton Project Room. NYC.

A gridded tableau of 36 like-themed images finds composition, the result the stuff of all good photography…captured light and dark…depictions in juxtaposition, balanced, regardless horizon or believed proper; very few of Warren’s images, are as included here in his creation of multiple impressions, “right (?) side up”. And the grid has long been a device of painting, allowing stability and the building blocks, a balanced avenue configuration. Tom uses it to enhance and attract, to draw attention subsequently to each image, in singularity – the comparison one space to another, those sharing a purposeful commonality, but better, in negotiation the planar disposition of depicted (captured) space.

Tom Warren is long a participant in the downtown scene, recognized early for his impromptu photo sessions documenting the artists and communities that made it the end of the century creative hub, and drawing the attention of the world. His are the joyful portraits of then young, makers – playful – before true maturity and the demands of a soon serious art market introduced professionalism, and thus, competitive positioning; those including many of the members of the artist’s collective, Colab, now enjoying white-box careers; Jenny Holzer, Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, Walter Robinson, Robin Winters and many others amongst their more than 60 members.

Photographic image, as compositionally presented, in Tom Warren’s “Visual Journal Grid”, at the Abaton Project Room. NYC.

Turning his focus then further south, Warren finds in Manhattan’s financial district, not the welcoming warmth of flesh, but the cold skin of exclusion, secrecy and monied tactic. Here, Tom searches for signs of life, for understanding a less welcoming city. In the dappled light of exposure, he pursues not in the faces of an occupying humanity, but to an understanding of the place that is inhabited by its workforce, to face the bull. WM